Bob Spitz - The Beatles

It's physically impossible at this point in publishing history to have read every word of print devoted to the Fabs lest we live to the age of Methuselah, and the broad outlines of the story are familiar to all within the confines of Western civilization.  So if you're going to read one and only one out of the literally thousands (!) of books on the Beatles (I've read three; one was reviewed last year on this site, and the other one, The Love You Make, was gossippy crap), this is as close as we may get to a definitive take.  For starters, it's comprehensive:  864 pages, and they're long, small-print pages that take a couple of minutes to absorb, which clocks in at 864 pages x 2 minutes per page = ah, you do the math!  (And that's not counting the footnotes, appendix, and what-have-you that I didn't read.)  A great deal of attention is paid to the boys' pre-Beatles lives, particularly John's (let's stick to first names; we know these lads intimately enough to drop the surnames); in fact, we're well over 300 pages in before "Love Me Do," is released as a single.  Not that I'm complaining - the glimpses into the hard-scrabble lives of lower-middle and working class Britons during the post-war decades of harsh austerity are fascinating in a grittily tough-realist mode.  The image of Ringo beginning by banging on a jerry-rigged set-up literally composed of kitchen utensils is a wryly comic touch in the otherwise miserably Dickensian childhood of the poorest Beatle.  Anyway, summarizing the plot is too big of a bite for this little review; let's just say that the book does a fine job of balancing the weight of the material between the musical and personal aspects of the Beatles' story.  Musically, the sections on Revolver are unsurprisingly the most gripping, with George Martin wisely disregarding John's wishes to invite an actual section of Tibetan monks chanting for the chorus and have himself spun upside down in a circle around the microphone to sing the vocal for "Tomorrow Never Knows."  Ah, John - what a fucking prick.  Some naive Beatles fans have complained that this book is unfairly biased  against John - "He comes across as a total asshole!"  Well, I've got news for ya:  John Lennon was a total asshole.  His great talent and the fact that he was completely, nakedly honest about himself and his faults seemed to be the only genuinely likable things about the guy.  And the latter is only one aspect of his unrelenting narcissism:  the word 'solopsistic' doesn't even begin to describe John's worldview.  As one person once nastily quipped, he was the type of guy who thought that his own farts were significant (and put them to tape, and then released them on Apple with a naked Yoko Ono on the cover).  The other three generally come across as fairly normal guys.  Yes, Paul did have a bit of an anal control freak that comes out during the Let It Be sessions, and George obviously suffered from an inferiority complex (well, wouldn't you?), and Ringo....well, he was Ringo, a level-headed, bog-ordinary chap, rather boring if you admit it, but a necessary stabilizing foundation of bloke-ordinariness to John's madness, Paul's yuppie upward mobility, and George's flakey yogi-mysticism.  As for the 'fifth Beatle', Pete Best is seen flying off into an understandable rage when he gets news of the sack, before fading out in the mist of history; George Martin is presented as an old-fashioned, button-down English gentleman of the stripe that we sadly see too little of in this contemporary world; and Brian Epstein remains the most compellingly tragic figure in the Beatles story, a true victim of society and its intolerance if there ever was one.  If you're at all interested in the band, this is a must-read - don't let the heft put you off; you won't need to read another book on the Beatles ever again.  Because if this doesn't fully satisfy your appetite, phoney Beatlemania hasn't bitten the dust round your house.

The Sound - Shock of Daylight

Shock of Daylight (1984) ****

Now why did Borland & the boys wait until they were kicked off the majors & back on an indie label to start releasing the most commercial music of their career?!  The music is somewhat glossier & slightly poppier than their previous releases (certainly moreso than commercially disastrous goth-bomb All Fall Down, which earned them the music biz pariah status in the first place).  After three critically well-received but commercially dubious albums (I just realized I've used the word 'commercial' three times in the first three sentences - oops, now that's four) in 1984 nobody cared about the Sound.  They'd had their chance at the brass ring and blown it.  More's the pity for the public, as this six-song EP brings back the brite hooks missing from their murky third LP for a bracing blast of solid melodycraft that stands up to the best of their classic first two LPs.  Actually, if not for the one-chord wonder ballad, "Winter," which frankly is way too musically rudimentary and lacking in hooks & dynamics to not painfully drag, this is their most consistent release - all of the songs are not merely excellent, but the Sound at the top of their game.  The other quibbling flaw on this essentially flawless dish is that the Sound aren't making any major advances - any of these songs could have fit seamlessly on From the Lion's Mouth.  Taken as a whole, however, the mood conveyed is considerably brighter and upbeat, dare I say it happier.  "Golden Soldiers," rampages out of the gate as their most directly forceful anthem ever - it's, it's, it's so anthemic.  A bit disarming (no pun intended) in its direct simplicity as a raging anthem-rocker, but none the worse for it - one of their finest singles, in fact, and in a just world would be sitting pretty next to "Pride (In the Name of Love)" on '80s AOR.  "Counting the Days," likewise is unusually pretty and happy by their standards, a straightforward, sincere, mid-tempo chimer of a love ballad.  "Longest Days," "A New Way of Life," and "Dreams Then Plans," all sit comfortably in the mid-section between ballad and rocker, hard and dreamy, anthemic and subtle, moodily post-punk and commercially Big '80s.  (There I go again for a fifth time!)  All three sound kind of similar in style but are individually different enough to register as unique song-entities.  In fact, "Longest Days," may be my favorite track.  Let's listen! Dig that ascending guitar hook!

The Fall - Code: Selfish

Code: Selfish (1992) ***

As exciting and artistically a triumph as the 'whatever' lackluster album cover, this platter ain't too bad after a few digs in, but by no means essential (unless you're a completist, which all Fallanatics are by definition).  Balancing a tasteful measure of bracing techno-influenced guitar-rock with dollops of the smooth, tuneful Fallmuzak we were introduced to on the previous pair of LPs, the Fall break no new ground here and a great deal of this comes across Fall-by-rote.  Not that there aren't a handful of velly gouda songs-ah on-ah here-ah - if only the opener, "The Birmingham School of Business School," didn't drag on for six minutes, but it's the Fall in their patented draggy-repetitive-hypnotic mode, so what the hell - but you do have to be in the mood for the Fall in their draggy-repetitive-hypnotic mode.  Nice little nagging guitar lyrics and Mark's singing (ha ha ha) with passionate venom, a nice return to form after the sleepy mumblings of Shit-Work.  And hey, look, there's a Hank Williams, Sr. cover!  It's not that great.  Maybe I'm just getting burnt out on this band, but listening to this seems like too much of a chore.  Or maybe they were genuinely releasing sub-par material during the first half of the '90s.  It's hard to be objective in this case.  After enduring a couple dozen Fall albums, you'll understand the dilemma afflicting my critical facilities.  Or is that 'faculties'?  Anyway, I should mention two standout tracks that make the cut of my three-disc Fall mix-volume.  "Free Range," was the big hit single (well, in the U.K., and only a minor dent on the charts) and deserved to be, and ranks among their classic dance-rockers.  It's driving!  It's scratchy!  It's got Mark pitching it up to a voice-cracking squeal!  It pays to talk to no one!  No one!  "Gentleman's Agreement," sounds exactly like "Don't Bring Harry," era Stranglers.  Hey, wait - it is "Don't Bring Harry"!  With different words!  Still a nice little piano ballad, and despite the obvious source inspiration, works dreamily enough to earn its spot as the album's #2 track.  "Return," and the aforementioned "Birmingham..." and "Two Face," vie it out for the remaining Top 5 slots in a back-alley rumble.  "Married, 2 Kids," a fun rockabilly goof.  "Crew Filth," is nothing more than 5 minutes of random cussing, and "Everything Hurtz," is as painful as a hangover (maybe that was the intention).  13 songs.  About half of them are good.  Get it if you see it cheap, but only after the other fifteen much more essential Fall CDs.  No, I'm not going to list them in order of greatness.  Read the site.

P.S. One thing I've noticed about the Fall is that NOBODY can seem to agree on what their best and worst albums are.  I've never encountered a band whose fans and critics are so all over the place in regards to their ouvre.  But one thing we can agree on - "Free Range," what a song!  Whoop dee whoot!

The Sound - All Fall Down

All Fall Down (1982) ***1/2

The difficult artsy third album in which formerly supremely catchy new-wave synth-rockers downplay the shiny hookcraft in favor of denser, more experimental soundscapes:  if the first two Sound albums were analogous to The Cars and Candy-O respectively, this is Borland & Co.'s Panorama.  But as the Sound were nowhere near the commercial big leagues of the Cars (outside of the Low Countries, apparently), the resulting excursion into impenetrable non-commerciality resulted in the Sound being dropped by their major label, who initially balked at releasing it at all.  And yes, on first and even fourth listen, the tunes do seem too indirect and the hooks too subtly buried in texture to come across to the listener at all - where are the killer choruses?  The surging anthemic fist ravers?  But as sometimes is the case with self-consciously dense and difficult albums, the material slowly reveals itself and bustles into your hedgerow - a slow-burner this album 'tis.  The hooks and melodies are intact; the listener simply must exert his ears a bit more.  And this is the Sound:  it's only by comparison with their first two records, which defined 'immediately blazeningly hooky' that this is uncommercially less than highly listenable.  After all, "Party of the Mind," (a thematic rewrite of the Fabs' "There's a Place") stands as frothingly boppy a pop single as anything they've put out previous.  It's an anomaly that sounds like nothing else on the record, however.  The title track that opens the album sets the tone, as dense throbs of rhythm pummel oppressively on as Borland chants snatches of apocalyptic nursery rhymes to a tune that could at best be described as rudimentary.  The music is denser and more intricate than the relatively thin lightness of From the Lion's Mouth, which does make it more interesting on a textural level even if the songs aren't up the same level.  Emotionally, Borland seems sadder and more despondent, with his significantly lowered vocals mouthing declamations more ponderous and ominous (this may be due to a production error - whatever, it does make his vocals more powerful and distinctive).  If the first two albums twinned like a synth-ier English counterpart to concurrent U2, this presages mid-'90s Radiohead at points, particularly the experimental 7-minute centerpiece of side two, "Glass and Smoke," - almost defiantly tuneless and structureless, it twists and roils around on a bed of rudimentary, repetitive four-note bass and dislocated kettle drums recorded in the next door closet, interrupted by careening shards of guitar noise, as the climax resolves into Borland bellowing, "I'm not stupid!"  Not exactly my favorite track - intentionally rough listening, 'tis - but certainly the most sonically adventurous and interesting.   The reissue adds three bonus tracks, one of which - the self-descriptive, Wire-y instrumental "The One and a Half Minute Song," - is the definition of a throwaway.  "Sorry" and "As Feeling Dies," however, are enough of a piece with the preceding album that you'll barely notice the transition, with the former perhaps finding Borland singing in too low of a key for comfort, and the latter even more apocalyptically depressing than anything else on a quite apocalyptically depressing album (geez, just look at the title):  "You kill me with your words / I kill you with my eyes," threatens the chorus.  Why weren't these guys as big as Haircut 100?  Remind me again?



Eels - Electro-Shock Blues

Electro-Shock Blues (1998) ****

A five-star album if you are in precisely the right mood, a mere three-star album if you aren't:  you do the math.  Problem is, I haven't had a loved one die on me in quite a few years, so many that I have to think hard on it (not counting beloved pets, of course).  Yes, this is a concept album concerning the scythe of the Ol' Reaper, unmistakably inspired by a pair of recent deaths in E's nuclear family:  the lyrics are bluntly artless and there's no mistaking the specific subject matter, the specific real-life deaths that E is eulogizing on this long-player (and its great fault is that:  it's l-o-o-o-o-o-n-g).  The song-cycle begins by setting the scene of "Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor," from a drug-inflicted suicidal overdose, and matters do not get cheerier from there.  Luckily, as we have seen from my previous reviews, E is contemporary pop's meisterburger of despondent clinical depression infused in sickly sweet pop nougats, so it's a listenable pop album despite the morbid weight of the subject matter.  But boy, can it get rough going, and not just because of the lyrics.  The songs are so crushingly sad that E seems determined to avoid anything so trite as hooks:  an easy way in would make the songs seem too trivial, y'know?  Whatever, this is probably superior to any similarly hookless Lou Reed character-sketch concept LP, and just as fun (which is to say - no, not fun at all).  On the first few listens the album seems non-descript, an emotional and wordy confessional album that certainly benefited the artist's therapeutic purging more than the listener's auditory pleasure.  And in truth, none of the songs truly stand out as knock-you-out highlights:  it's a seamlessly flowing concept album, and unlike most concept albums, the songs really do need to be experienced together as an album's flow of tracks - the whole, in this case, genuinely is greater than the sum of its parts.  Many of the songs seem fragmentary, or are literally fragmentary, such as the aforementioned album opener, whose ghostly presence in background melody floats over the succeeding two tracks like - well, a ghost (and not just because track #2 is entitled "Going to Your Funeral").  The tracks aren't stitched together musically a la Abbey Road, but they do flow together in such a thematic way that it's difficult to imagine them as separable, or in any other sequence.

Which is another problem:  for whatever reason, E has decided to save the best for last.  There are good songs scattered throughout the first 11 tracks, particularly "Speed," a pretty acoustic ballad that is only marred by a wincingly trite lyric, "Life is funny, but not ha ha funny," that bumps up like an uncomfortable lump in the throat.  Oh well, he's not the world's greatest lyricist, even if he does manage the ocassional coup, such as this album's most oft-quoted line, "Grandpa's watching video porn / With the closed-caption on".  And there's the ocassional bad song, as well:  I know that the jazzy shuffle, "Hospital Food," is supposed to be a touch of goofy humor designed to lighten the painfully morbid mood, and I can see how it's necessary, but as E has no discernible gift for cracking a joke or even a smile, it comes as irritatingly hectoring.  But just as you're ready to write this off as a mildly interesting but unexceptional exercise in Plastic Ono Band self-confessional, beginning with track #12, E trots out his trusty acoustic and hits you over the head with his talent, as the remaining five songs are not only deeply, heartbreaking emotional (hell, the whole album is - have you been paying attention?) but effectively moving musically as well.  I suspect that the simple, unadorned singer-songwriter approach of the final five cuts (relatively unadorned - there's some rather obtrusive orchestration in the background) has everything to do with it.  Oh yes, I've dwelt so much on the lyrical side of things that I've almost forgotten to mention the actual music, haven't I?  There's a mild hip-hop influence that shows up most firmly (and a bit awkwardly) on the album's most commercial track, "Cancer for the Cure," (with a title like that for the catchiest A-side, you can see why this wasn't a blockbuster), and "The Medication is Wearing Off".  Mostly this is E-music, however, with toy-like children's instruments mixing with E's world-weary nicotine rasp, his confessional singer-songwriting with the musical focus squarely on the lyrics, and heavy-handed background orchestrations mixing with the conventional alt.rock. 

Best lyric:  "I was at a funeral the day I realized I wanted to spend my life with you."  Read that line again if you didn't get the tragic implication the first time around.

The Go-Betweens - Oceans Apart

What would you do if you turned around and saw me

Not in a dream, but in a song?

Oceans Apart (2005) ****

After all these years, I've finally gotten the knack of discerning between Forster and McLennan.  Or rather to say, in their middle-age their styles have diverged substantially enough that even on first listen it's easy to spot who's who.  Would McLennan have opened an album with a jittery, paranoid and brittle rocker, "Here Comes the City," that awkwardly (but endearingly) drops a gratuitous reference to Dostoyevsky?  Well into his 40s, is Robert still trying to impress tantalizing librarians?  And the second track, "Finding You," with its clear-eyed soft-folk melodic strum and thrum, could only have flowed from the pen of Grant in his mellifluous middle age:  its instantly memorable lilt and tenderly poetic lyricism mark it as a clear highlight.  However, as on the previous album, Forster manages to come up with the smarter batch of tunes, mostly because they are smarter and tougher.  McLennan, traditionally the more pop-tuneful of the duo (Sir Paul to Bob's John), has grown more lush and atmospheric in his approach, and while I have no doubt that an entire album of lushly atmospheric soft-rock numbers would prove soporific, the flow of the 10 songs on this album (you expected a different number of tracks?) nicely balances the generally more pointed Forster numbers with the gentler McLennan tunes.  Not that Grant's anything approaching a slouch:  aside from penning the album's aforementioned highlight, he also snags in a few more with "No Reason to Cry," (which boasts an exquisite guitar solo), the lovely melodic wash of "Statue," the blink-and-it's-over-too-soon "Boundary Rider," and "This Night's For You," which adds some pleasingly coo-ing doo-wop "ba ba ba's" to the backing chorus, and all of which give Adult Alternative folk-pop a grand name.  Hmm, perhaps on second reflection, Grant's the clear winner this time out, with a stronger set of tunes despite the soft, blurry edges.  And with the exception of "Lavender," a straightforward ballad that gratingly lacks any discernable hook, none of Forster's tunes misfire, either.  Some might irk at "Darlinghurst Nights," dragging a little too long at 6 1/2 minutes, but hey - does the word Dylanesque mean anything to you?  The semi-autobiographical "Born to Family," in which Robert recounts of how he broke with the family tradition of hard, honest toil to follow the path he had to follow as a working musician, is another clear highlight.  And finally, rural elegy of "The Mountains Near Dellray," could be Forster's attempted rewrite of McLennan's classic from way back when "Cattle and Cane,"  - fittingly capping off the Go-Between's career, full circle with one of the strongest albums of their career, not to mention their most commercially successful:  after all this time, they were finally gaining the success and recognition they deserved, which makes Grant McLennan's death the year after this release all the more tragic.  From this evidence, the Go-Betweens could've kept cranking out quality albums at a steady pace until they were physically too infirm to pick up guitars.

Public Image Limited - The Flowers of Romance

The Flowers of Romance (1981) **1/2

Someone once quipped that John Lydon was the master of the influential but unlistenable, and this is one of those discs that is recommended listening for any adventurous music fan if only to try the limits of what you can define as 'listenable' (at least in a pop/rock context).  First, let's underline the difference between Metal Box and this followup, third PIL studio album:  no Jah Wobble.  Charming gent that Mr. Lydon is, he sheds members like a snake its skin, and this time out, he decided not to bother advertising for a replacement bassist.  Which means that the, ahem, 'tunes' revolve around Lydon's wailing over Martin Atkin's spare, tribalistic drums (well, how else can the music be described as anything but tribalistic when it consists of mostly drumming and vocal wailing and little else?).  Keith Levene is still present, but as a much more muted presence:  his contributions consist mostly of keyboard splashes (used as dry and minimalistically as anything else on the record), with his guitar only brought out occasionally as one more minor element of texture.  What it, in effect, amounts to is Metal Box II with all the bass parts deleted from the mix and subsequently much less interesting and much, much less danceable.  Oh, not that it's not interesting - the music carries the punk minimalist aesthetic to at least one of its logical conclusions:   drum'n'voice'n'cheap Casio.  The opening track sounds vaguely Arabic in its snakey call-to-prayer vocal wailing, but whether that was intentional or not - scratch me.  Maybe these potheads were adding some vinyl from Morocco to their steady diet of dub reggae.  The album also contains many stretches of instrumental meandering; perhaps that's why "Banging the Door," leaps out as the most memorable track, as it actually possesses a coherent and memorable vocal melody (chant, actually; I'd be hard to describe much of this music as 'melodic' in the traditional sense).  Have a I stressed enough how difficult this music is to get into?  If you want to clear a crowded room, this is one of those Top Ten 'Party Clearer' records, at least as far as nominally 'rock' albums are concerned.  This is Adam and the Ants' "noble savage drum drum drum" as conceived by John Cage, with all the fun sucked out of it.  Too monochromatically grim to take pleasure in the potentially colorful weirdness of the anti-pop concept.  As with Metal Box, PIL conjure a dour yet compelling atmosphere and proceed to coast on sheer sound for the entire album without writing any but the barest of 'songs'.  But as with most sequels, the quality is considerably inferior.  "No fun!"  But interesting.